I thought Google killed its augmented reality glasses after they couldn’t live up to the promise of real-time translation. I thought Project Iris was vaporware after the company shed its AR leaders and downsized the division that was reportedly facing internal turmoil.

But we may have written off Google’s Glasses too soon — because Google just revealed a new prototype pair in a blink-and-you-missed-it moment at Google I/O.

In the heat of the moment, I thought the Googler simply donned a pair of normal glasses before pulling out their smartphone at 1:30 in the Project Astra demo video below. But no, those frames are thick.

There’s even a little picture-in-picture moment where you can see them wearing the glasses. Here it is zoomed in:

Once the glasses are on, the Googler is using them, not their Pixel phone, to ask questions and get answers hands-free.

Are these just repurposed Project Iris prototypes? They seem similar enough, but the ones that Google prominently showed off in its 2022 video had flat nose bridges. The new nose bridge is curved.

Google didn’t tell my colleague David anything about these glasses in our Project Astra interview, but the company doesn’t exactly seem to be hiding them, either. In the YouTube description for the Project Astra video, Google says the second chunk of the demo is running on “a prototype glasses device.”

Here’s what Google spokeperson Jane Park tells me: “The glasses shown are a functional research prototype from our AR team at Google. We do not have any launch plans to share.”

With Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses proving to be the best AI wearable so far, beating out Rabbit and Humane for utility despite having no screen, it’s not surprising that Google might want to revive its glasses ambitions.

In mid-2022, Google got far enough with its previous prototypes that it planned to start testing them in public — you’ll let us know if you see these ones in your neighborhood, right?

Update, May 15th: Added comment from Google.

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